Musagetes’ doors will be open on Thursday, February 13 from 6-8 PM as part of the Boarding House Arts Incubator Open House 2014. Join us in our main floor office to experience recently released publications and a new recording. We will be hosting a listening session of the newly-released vinyl LP Between a Rock and a Hard Place. This field recording is part of a project by Dutch artists Bik Van der Pol, which took place in Sudbury during the summer of 2012, when a series of punk, folk, rock, classical and electronica concerts formed an alternate map of Sudbury for one day: eleven local bands on eleven swatches of land. We will also have books available from PS Guelph, a collaborative project of Musagetes and a group of veteran book enthusiasts, PS Guelph is a print-on-demand publisher that serves as a space for publication in its fullest sense, by both producing books and bringing people together through the shared experience of reading. Every book is made one at a time by hand, and we attend to the social life of the book using any means possible to expand its circle of readers: physical books, a digital commons, eBooks, and wild social events. This breathes life into the written word on paper, online, and through discussion. Musagetes will have the latest offerings of PS Guelph available for purchase: POP ART POEM (with Advertising) is a chapbook by Toronto artist and University of Guelph graduate Jesse Harris which repurposes the WHAAM!s and CRASHes of pop art as poetry; Sound Guelph, by local archaeologist David J. Knight charts the alternative musics and sonic experimentations of Guelph in the last three decades; The Omen is a gothic horror novel by the founder of the municipality of Guelph and voluminous author, John Galt.

We’re also thrilled to announce this first opportunity for the public to meet the Arts Incubator resident artists, and to tour their studios to see what they’ve been working on since the program was established in October 2013. The Arts Incubator is a one-year studio residency program designed to provide Guelph area based artists with resources to help them advance their professional careers. Artists are selected through a competitive process in response to an annual open call for participants. This program aims to support a breadth of artistic practices ranging from media-based work to painting to socially-engaged art to photography.

Incubator resident artists include Whitney Arnott, Colin Carney, Annie Dunning, Monika Hauck, Gabriel Parniak, Adrienne Spier and Rachel Vanderzwet. A selection of their art, curated by gallerist Renann Isaacs, will be on display throughout the building. The Arts Incubator is up and running through a partnership between Boarding House Arts, Musagetes and the School of Fine Art and Music (SOFAM) at the University of Guelph with the additional support of the Guelph Community Foundation (Wood/Roberts Family Fund and Musagetes Fund).

Other organizations and artists will also be opening their spaces for the evening:
Other Boarding House Arts studio artists, including Jenn E Norton, Outside-In Studio (Christine Campbell, Susie Campbell, and Barb Gilmore), Martin Pearce, Emily Schaefer, and , will share recent work in a variety of media from video to drawing to painting.
Boarding House Gallery (an artistic partnership between SOFAM and the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre) will feature paintings by renowned contemporary Canadian painter Ron Shuebrook. Shuebrook is the Senior Artist in Residence at Boarding House Arts and will be in attendance and his studio will also be open.
Capacity3Gallery is a new space for engaging, risk-taking, experimental contemporary art. Artist Janine Miedzik’s Zig Zag Wanderer will be the inaugural exhibit, launching the space. Miedzik is an MFA candidate at the University of Guelph and this is her first solo show in Guelph.
We welcome you in from the cold on this mid-winter evening for refreshing and stimulating creative experiences. This is an opportunity to explore and interact with the new, rich, and diverse community of artists and arts organizations housed here at Boarding House Arts. Come on out and hunt through our beautiful restored building for some incredible art!

Boarding House Arts is non-profit organization that manages building spaces as well as the Arts Incubator and Studio programs. The Studio program seeks to provide affordable space within a community of practicing professional artists. A variety of strategies are being developed to promote public and critical exposure for artists in both programs.